'He’s brought back the Howard battlers': The battle for the suburbs has been reignited

Veterans of past elections can see more than one victory for Scott Morrison in the way he astonished his critics and shattered his rivals last Saturday.

Voters swung to Morrison with a force that weakened the Labor Party’s hold on suburban and regional Australia, setting up an extraordinary opportunity for the Liberal Party to cement and build upon those gains.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison greeted members of the community at Cloncurry Bowls Club.Credit:Derek Barry/North West Star

It is already reminding some Liberals of the way John Howard won the confidence of the “battlers” two decades ago.

“What Scott Morrison has done is connect with the Howard battlers – he’s brought back the Howard battlers,” says Alexander Downer, who witnessed the same trend as foreign affairs minister during the Howard government. “And in doing that, he’s created some stresses and strains with the well-heeled elites in electorates like Wentworth or Kooyong.”

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It is too soon to be sure of any lasting shift but the immediate impact holds opportunity and danger for both major parties. Morrison connected with ordinary workers who spurned Labor and its leader, Bill Shorten. The next Labor leader, Anthony Albanese, sees the need to win back the suburbs.

Illustration: Matt GoldingCredit:

Everything turns on whether Morrison can drive the Liberals further into this electoral heartland – or whether his party succumbs to hubris and infighting once again.

Downer, who was a cabinet minister for more than a decade thanks to those Howard battlers, identifies the parallels with the 1990s.

“Things haven’t changed that much. I don’t think the public are changing nearly as much as the media says they are,” he says. “The Howard government held those silvertail suburbs and seats but struggled in those areas at times, while it had strong support in the suburbs.”

The more comfortable suburbs might disapprove of Howard on issues like border protection and climate change, but those on lower incomes generally backed the Coalition.

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Liberals saw this last Saturday when they lost voters in Kooyong, Goldstein, Higgins and North Sydney at the very time they railed against Labor policies to squeeze wealthier Australians. Warringah was a unique case, given the long fall of Tony Abbott, but the Liberals cannot afford to ignore the way climate change swayed some voters.

More important, however, was the battle for the suburbs. The Liberals were written off several months ago in the Melbourne electorate of La Trobe and secured a 1.3 per cent swing instead. They were in trouble in the Sydney electorate of Banks but gained a 5.7 per cent.

While the Liberal National Party’s surge in the suburbs of Brisbane was vital to its victory, this election was not just about Queensland. There was good news for the conservative side of politics in every major city.

The outcome brings the shocking realisation for Labor that its tactics were flawed. It could not win on a major tax agenda. Perhaps nobody can. Downer believes Shorten would have been better off campaigning almost solely on the “Coalition of chaos” line rather than on Labor policy.

Albanese now faces the task of resetting Labor policy on franking credits, negative gearing, superannuation and other tax changes that would have raised $160 billion over a decade. He appears unlikely to accept anything more than the first stage of the government’s $158 billion in income tax cuts over a decade, as announced in the April 2 budget.

The debate about “aspirational” workers will define this Parliament. While the Coalition stands for tax relief for all, Labor must decide whether to end the tax cuts at income levels of around $126,000. Will it recognise that someone on $150,000 cannot live in luxury in one of Australia’s big cities?

Shorten gained constant affirmation on Twitter for opposing tax cuts at the higher end of the income scale, but clicks are not votes. Albanese will have to move carefully.

Nobody can be certain about the income level of the Liberal voters in some of the “battler” suburbs, given the huge doubts about the opinion polls that might in other circumstances break down the vote. Nobody can be certain about the other issues that influenced their decisions.

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But the tone of the Labor campaign mattered. It sought to divide rather than unite – it was a “class war” according to Shorten’s critics, an attack on the “top end of town” according to Shorten himself.

In the final days of the campaign, Shorten chose to make a speech in the same hall Gough Whitlam used for his “It’s Time” campaign launch in 1972. Shorten would have been wiser to choose wherever Bob Hawke launched the “consensus” era in the 1983 campaign.

Labor is in grave danger of looking like the party of the comfortable inner cities. Only a few caucus members, not least Joel Fitzgibbon, Catherine King and Shayne Neumann, represent regional areas.

Faith still matters to many Australians but Labor and Greens supporters have developed a talent for suggesting, or perhaps merely assuming, that Morrison’s Pentecostal Christianity is somehow an oddity. Yet the evidence from the election is that Australians are comfortable with a leader who has strong beliefs. One of the iconic images of the election campaign was of Morrison praying. Why should Australians of faith find this troubling?

Morrison reached some Australians in a way Shorten could not. His suburban character in southern Sydney, based on his love of football, his love of family and his Christianity, clearly resonated. For some, perhaps, it counted more than the difference between the competing tax plans.

Scott Morrison sings during an Easter Sunday service at his Sydney church.Credit:AAP

“I think Labor has lost a great slice of the professional class by attacking aspiration,” says John Wanna, the Sir John Bunting Chair of Public Administration at the Australian National University.

“Look at the big swings around Brisbane, swings to the Coalition in Victoria and western NSW and Sydney seats.

“They may have also upset a blue collar and tradie class in regional areas who are anxious about jobs. The Coalition’s better economic management record probably played a factor given the economic uncertainties we face going forward.”

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Wanna, who has studied Australian elections since 1969, was also struck by the way retirees deserted Labor over the franking credits change, which he sees as just one part of a broader problem with the scale of the Labor tax revenue increases on super, property, capital gains and more. “I’ve never seen an election campaign where an opposition went in creating as many constituencies of enemies,” he says.

This was not a resounding election result and the scale of the Coalition victory is easily overblown. Malcolm Turnbull led the Coalition to win 76 seats three years ago and was judged a failure. Morrison appears likely to win 78 seats and is hailed as a hero. Everything is shaped by expectation.

But the Coalition lead is far more convincing than last time. In 2016, the Turnbull government gained about 100,000 more voters than Labor in two-party terms nationwide. The result from this year’s election, in counting on Friday afternoon, puts the Morrison government ahead by about 300,000 votes.

The two major parties confront serious structural challenges, such as their struggle to increase their membership in an expanding society, and one lesson from the campaign was that Morrison’s personal appeal mattered far more than the Liberal Party brand or the cabinet. The brand and the team were hidden.

Judith Brett, Emeritus Professor of Politics at La Trobe University, cautions against looking for deep structural changes for either party in a single election result.

“I think we are seeing the effect of the marked decline in party identification for both parties – the swing away from the Liberals in their safe heartland seats as well as swings away from Labor,” she says. “One of the traditional functions of political parties was to simplify the political world for people – and to simplify their choices. Parties are doing this for far fewer people than previously.”

Brett is the author of a new book on compulsory voting, From Secret Ballot to Democracy Sausage, as well as Australian Liberals and the Moral Middle Class, a study of the conservative side of politics from Alfred Deakin to Howard.

“Labor was appealing to an electorate they thought was paying more attention than it actually was,” she says.

Rather than making a close study of the competing policies, many voters felt they could trust Morrison more than Shorten.

Voters are no longer glued to the major parties but are still required to vote, increasing the volatility at every election.

The battlers shifted Morrison’s way this time. Not all of them, but certainly enough of them. Albanese has years to consider how to swing them back.